I'm a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, IGN.com, Wired and more. I cover social games, video games, technology and that whole gray area that happens when technology and consumers collide. Google

How This Guy Lied His Way Into MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times and More

Ryan Holiday could be called an “expert.” As head of marketing for American Apparel, an online strategist for Tucker Max, and self-styled “media manipulator,” he can talk social media and modern advertising with the best of them – he’s done so both online and in print on countless occasions. He is not an expert in barefoot running, investing, vinyl records, or insomnia. But he is a liar. With a little creative use of the internet, he’s been quoted in news sources from small blogs to the most reputable outlets in the country talking about all of those things.

Holiday, 25 years old and based in New Orleans, mostly wanted to see if it could be done. He had been getting blogs to write what he wanted for years, and had developed a sense of how stories were put together in the internet age. He thought he could push the envelope a bit further.

“I knew that bloggers would print anything, so I thought, what if, as an experiment, I tried to prove that they will literally print anything?” he says. “Instead of trying to get press to benefit myself, I just wanted to get any press for any reason as a joke.”

He used Help a Reporter Out (HARO), a free service that puts sources in touch with reporters. Basically, a reporter sends a query, and a slew of people wanting to comment on the story email back. He decided to respond to each and every query he got, whether or not he knew anything about the topic. He didn’t even do it himself — he enlisted an assistant to use his name in order to field as many requests as humanly possible.

“I could hear hands going up and down the frets, and stuff that they probably didn’t want you to hear. Which is a nice little surprise,” he told them.

Holiday had a lot of advantages in his experiment – his title as Marketing Director for American Apparel made him seem respectable, and most of his stories were such thorough lies that they came out on the other side of believable. But a quick Google search would have raised red flags for anyone using him as a source. For one thing, he wrote a book called “Trust Me, I’m Lying.”His Huffington Post profile has the word “notorious” in the first line. He’s repeatedly described himself as a “media manipulator.” He has a checkered reputation online, and his penchant for media stunts is well-documented. He also writes for Forbes, where a few of his big stories have generated more than their share of controversy. I got a leak from him about Tucker Max back in February, and sure enough, traffic ensued.

None of that came up as he shot out story after story to dozens of news sources. Throughout the experiment, he says he received a single fact checking email — the site sent an email to the same address he had used for the pitch, asking if he was indeed Ryan Holiday. He said yes.

Lying to journalists is nothing new. People have swindled newspapers for free publicity long before tools like HARO even existed. Holiday is probing just how easy it can be in 2012. HARO Founder Peter Shankman notes that anyone abusing the system can be flagged and banned, and ultimately, the service is just a tool, and should be subject to all the same old rules of journalism.

“As a journalist, it’s always been your job to do your research and check the source, whether you find that source on the street, on Craigslist or on HARO,” he says. “If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing your job however you find the source.”

From a reporter’s perspective, it’s not hard to see how it happens. I used HARO once, for this story. Tools like this streamline the hectic process that is blogging — were the situation different, I could see easily myself swindled by someone like Holiday. With each story he was quoted in, there would have been an analog way to get the source – to find an insomniac, call a doctor who specializes in insomnia and ask if any of his or her patients would be willing to go on record. For vinyl records, call a store and ask the owner to put you in touch with his best customer. But oftentimes, it can be hard to justify taking the long way around when news moves at the speed of the internet.

For Roy Furchgott, the reporter from the New York Times, this kind of lie can be hard to catch — Holiday sounded just like all the other record collectors he had talked to, and it was hard to imagine why someone would lie about something so mundane.

“He gave a fairly credible account in line with what most vinyl record collectors and owners say,” he says. “So I took his word on it, as frequently happens, and you’re telling me that he suckered me.”

“I’ve been in the business a fairly long time, and I’ve seen this happen many times even prior to blogs. I don’t think this is isolated or terribly, terribly unusual.”

Holiday does it for the attention, the opportunity to point out some of the excesses of the modern blogosphere, and the lulz. Empires will not fall because he claimed someone once sneezed on him. Still, it gives one reason to stop and think about what the quest for traffic and eyeballs does to news. Depending on how you look at it, stunts like this either erode the trust a reader has in a publication, or point out that it may have been misplaced to begin with. It’s not a big leap to imagine somebody using those same tools for more nefarious purposes.

“A well made article and a poorly made article both do clicks the same way,” says Holiday. “There’s no incentive to do good work. We know that quotas make cops do sh***y things, or academic admissions offices do sh**ty things, and they make bloggers do sh***y things too.”

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Good for him (and good for you and your use of “ensued”, shame on me for getting the joke). It makes me think of a) the recent blown coverage of SCOTUS on the ACA and b) The Newsroom which would skewer this kind of story. Hopefully Sorkin hears about this…

It seems the concept of journalistic integrity has gone down just as quickly as print newspapers, and much for the same reason: If there’s a cheaper, easier way of doing things, what does it matter if it’s tautological and could lead to the mass publication of blatant falsehoods?

What concerns me is that this kid is still employed by Forbes magazine. If he’s so easily able to misrepresent himself to other news groups and the world at large, who would be dumb enough to think anything he has to say further would be credible? By extension, anything presented on Forbes magazine becomes suspect. If he lied to other major news groups, there’s no reason he hasn’t lied to Forbes as well. And it’s this sort of systemic fallacy and unaccountability that makes what could be the single greatest database for information the virtual slum for slander, misinformation, rumor, and pornography that it’s become.

By that same line of thinking, would Forbes magazine be willing to hire me? I’m a freelance writer. I’ve published on dozens of blogs over the years. I’ve written four books to date. I’m willing to lie and misrepresent myself as able and competent if it will get me a job. What other requirements do you people have?

John Richard: You’ve failed to take the final inescapable logical step–that it’s been like this all along and only now are we realizing it. In fact, it really has been like this.

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” –Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Norvell (June 11, 1807)

“…it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies – unless one counts journalists.” –George Orwell, “Homage to Catalonia” (1938)

Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy: Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge. (Erwin Knoll, editor, “The Progressive”)

With all due respect, your comment is silly and unwarranted. I own a small boutique law firm in Boston and – using HARO – I’ve been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, TheStreet.com, and others. A friend of mine who runs a PR firm here in Boston asked me who was running my media campaign because of all the (free) exposure I was getting. And, as a former journalist myself, I would have killed for a service like HARO back in my reporting days.

The bottom line is that there have always been jackasses who try to trick reporters and there always will be. Sometimes even very good reporters get taken. Blaming HARO for any of this is like blaming AT&T for the existence of the Jerky Boys or the legions of Howard Stern fans who like to shout “Ba-ba-booey.”

I stood in the corner of the BullS**itter in a previous post. And still do.

However, blaming AT&T, or any other ISP is like blaming Tide for making your clothes smell good. Just dumb. But perhaps the angry person is one who thrives better when in a controlled environment, like old school Russia. Or maybe a Mac user.

/Just referring to the ‘walled garden’ effect. I don’t hate Apple at all. Had a few. Windows keeps me employed though :-) //I.T. guy who likes Mac and PC.

Thanks for bringing this to people’s attention. This isn’t the first time HARO was rocked with a scam. As notes in their terms”

“Queries for product samples will only be accepted from reporters representing TV stations and verified print media. Product sample requests from websites or radio station reporters are not permitted. This is in order to protect our users from fraud and other scams. …”

This was due to one scammer that according to Peter swindled people previously. Similar to the scam you are reporting on, the staff of HARO incorrectly assume that someone who says they represent TV and print are who they say they are (no verification is required by HARO) and those that respond to queries can and most likely will be scammed again. Moreover it makes bloggers and other online journalists second class citizens and in particular hurts PR people in the tech industry since those journalists primarily work online.

HARO’s lack of verification and curation of sources and journalists makes it dangerous and unreliable. This guy “came out” as a scammer — but I’m sure thousands of others responded just to get their name in the paper.

Like we needed any more proof that Ryan Holliday is a raging a**hole. I think that’s been well established.

What I’d like to know is why Forbes still allows him to contribute blog posts. The man does brag about being a complete liar, does he not? Does anyone bother to fact check anything Holliday posts on this site?

I have used HARO and ProfNet quite extensively in my 3,297 years of journalism. Fortunately, I have never run across Holliday as a source. But I can see how easily something like that could happen. I don’t do background checks on every person I interview. I’m not sure that’s even possible. Anyone can create a fake LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc to back up a false identity. Ultimately the only way to know someone is who they say they are is to ask someone else who allegedly knows them — and then you have to trust that person. For a story about vinyl record collectors? Who has the time?

I have spent a lot of time pondering this question — how do I know the person I’m talking to is geniune? how does that person know I’m genuine? and the only solution is some kind of third party identification verification system. we don’t really have one of those, outside of the financial services industry and the government.

It was a stupid attention-getting exercise and nothing more — exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from that guy.

This is so brilliantly meta! Not only can Holiday manipulate the media into thinking he’s a collector of vinyl records, he can then use that story to manipulate Dave Thier who then manipulates his readers into thinking that only “liberal” media uses faulty sources. Notice how Ryan claims he responded to every request, but what media outlets were duped? MSNBC, NY Times, ABC—the bastions of “liberal” media.

And Holiday can claim that he wasn’t doing it to raise his profile—in fact, he can have Thier claim this on Thier’s blog, which was picked up by NOLA.com (where I found it). As it turns out Thier’s blog links to Holiday’s blog. Nope, not using this for self-promotion.

This stinks like a rotten fish. I guess that’s the Forbes echo chamber, where “journalists” who professionally lie are bloggers.

Also, others have pointed out how groundbreaking Holiday’s interventions were. Now that we know Holiday can’t hear fingers moving on the frets with vinyl I suppose the whole vinyl renaissance will collapse. Perhaps instead Holiday could use his skills to expose how corporations and our government manipulate media all the time. If he needs a tutorial I suggest he start with Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.

Lastly, I will point out that Holliday cannot write. From his blog: “But in this rising class, I also place some unlikely figures. Michael Arrington, former editor and founder of the popular blog TechCrunch. ”

The second sentence is a fragment, without anything resembling a verb to go with the subject. Perhaps he is a proud graduate of our (New Orleans’) excellent public school system.

I’ve written Steve Forbes about the very low content quality of some of these “contributors,” using Google to track how far off the rails they get. Just recently, I believe they finally roped in one guy who was an IRS expert, but kept posting about non-IRS stuff. As in, if you’re expert on the IRS — stay on F’ing topic.

Academics are well-known for their B.S. They think “professor” means being an expert on everything and no one else could be right.

Wrong — duh. And they need to be called out, 100% of the time. As in, “show us your spreadsheet on that.” Or, like with Kruggie, “so you have an economic viewpoint — so do 500 other PhDs in economics.”

This is one of the reasons why we created FlackList (www.flacklist.com), to put media in touch with pre-screened, pre-qualified experts. Rather than waiting for responses from a query and then having to sift through them, media can easily search for an expert in an industry and immediately connect with them. This feature is brand spanking new and we are in the process of screening/adding experts. The main reason we built FlackList was/is to connect media with the right brand PR rep and/or expert quickly. We hope you check us out!

From my Disgruntled Old Coot experience while huddled within my hovel and interacting with the outside world via the Web I hereby proclaim that with a multitude of reporters, essay writers, etc. that political correctness is more important than facts and real-life experience.

The finest writing I have read using my input was in a doctoral dissertation based at the London School of Economics that quoted my own published work.

“I suspect that “some” is a large number”… unless, of course, you are a reporter with an agenda. Then “some” becomes a very small, unverifiable amount of people who represent the reporter’s opinion they are trying to engage into a news story.

“Some” becomes even smaller when paired with “claims”. Google it for fun!

Bottom line: If a reporter uses the word “some” or “claim” in any article, they’re lying. And they almost all lie. And then they wonder why we don’t believe them.

The “two-source rule” wouldn’t have helped a bit in a story about vinyl-record collectors. What a reporter needs to is exactly what the article says — call a record store and ask for the names of its best customers who collect records.

Two-source rule matters when you’re trying to verify a piece of information. It has nothing to do with including real-people experiences in stories.

Oh lighten up party poopers and goody two-shoes, in fact all of you serious minded folks in journalism, advertising and particularly law where everything is so sacrosanct. If any of the 100 saints working for The MacArthur Foundation read this, they should target Ryan Holiday for a Genius Award in 2012. Another candidate would be Alan Abel (www.abelraisescain.com) who has tweaked reprorters’ noses over the past 50 years! Walter Cronkite went to his grave hating Abel for tricking him into endorsing a faux campaign to clothe all naked animals for the sake of decency, because “a nude horse is a rude horse.” Cronkite kept that chip on his shoulder for 40 years! He didn’t remain angry with Hitler, Mussolini, Castro or Hussein. That was the father of our news, folks. So lighten up news people. It’s ok to lie if you aren’t telling the truth. Sex and sales remain synonymous. You’ll never see a fat lady with pimples as an anchor on TV news, the best entertainment ever!

Hmmm. I’m not sure this proves much except that he’s a weird dude with an inexplicable agenda. He lied about getting sneezed on and owning Vinyl, not about being a professor at MIT or a brain surgeon. As a journalist, I’m confident I’ve never been duped by an expert source but I use doctors, professors and generally people whose identities I would verify beforehand. But I think when someone is giving you an “embarrassing office story” there’s a certain amount of trust implied. You know?

It would seem part of his agenda is to show how easy it is to publish crap that is believable. Since there is very little incentive for reporters to tell the truth I suspect that this will continue. I think now more then ever anybody can publish their opinion as if it where a fact. Using a person with a title for a source is just another way of misleading people unless you verify the person deserves their title and is not on meds.

No one should find joy or satisfaction in lying or deceiving others. The true failure of this man’s “experiment” is the fact that he finds it to be a talent of which he is very proud. Essentially, he has proven to the rest of the world that he has a very flawed character and a complete lack of moral ethics. Stop giving this man exposure, Forbes. He’s truly not worthy.

OK, so this guy basically said “Hey, I am full of shiat, but have a few interesting things to say, and you will like it”. Does that sum it up well? I applaud his ability to tell you he is a BS-er and then proceed with the BS-ing. Can’t hate on a guy who tells you he is just having fun manipulating the media.

Heck, look at all the ‘subversive’ crap we were in to when we were back in the day… Negativland, Pearl Jam, The Onion (in print form), Nat’l Lampoon…

This guy is nothing new. He is just using the tools around him.

/That girl that kept up an eleven year lie, now that’s just weird. //At least this guy told us he was full of it. :-)

This exposes some of the weaknesses of the bloggosphere world, its credibility and the reputation of journalists/writers who work for such digital news organisations. It’s still hard to beat traditional newspaper ‘grade’ articles and stories that are relevant, helpful yet very TRUSTWORTHY. No wonder advertising cost per mille (CPM) or cost per 1000 viewers cost on average over $6.50 (eMarketer, 2012) on digital newspaper properties and less for other news mediums (Google News would be around $4, Huffington Post maybe $2).

While the onus is absolutely on reporters to check their sources, if you follow the founder of HARO – you’ll see he is quite often an “expert” on things that he has no business speaking about himself. I lost faith in the Associated Press last week for including Shankman in their round up of crisis communications experts to discuss the Sandusky scandal. And listing Vocus as a PR firm. Really AP?

As a professional and credentialed Investigative Journalist, I would never let this happen but I guess the libtard media has far lower standards when it comes to the truth. No wonder they find it so easy to support a commie from Kenya.

Is it possible to include a indicator showing how much of the data reported as part of an article was cross-checked? That would help the readers and leave a way out for the gullible author. Of course, Editors won’t relish that – but they’ll be preforming far better than Cable news where charges and accusations based on erroneous facts and assumptions are endemic.

Heck, I know a bunch of guys in my industry, some ex-coworkers who lie their faces off to get in the news just to promote their companies. No one EVER fact checks them. Heck I’ve even called em out on it in specific ways. And yet the same BS ends up in the news time and again.

If you want to change the world, just stick to your lie and news reporters will keep printing it until the truth is lost.

What this shows as much as the ease one has in manipulating the press, is the mundane subject matter that passes for modern journalism. Sneezing on burgers, the pros of vinyl recordings and the effects of sleep are tired, old stories from news processes that are slowly being drained of funds, resources and the space to get the important news out to the masses.

To my mind the “story” here is how completely useless most journalism is–not just bloogers, most of whom don’t claim to be more than someone with a computer and an opinion, I mean “journalism.”

Consider that all the quotes from people who are supposed to represent interested non-experts may as well be just made up, like Holiday’s. Even if all the comments on HARO or ProfNet were honest, you still just have the reporter scanning dozens of people until he finds what he wants, and skipping over whatever he doesn’t want. Then the editor validates it and it gets published.

That’s supposed to help us be well-informed.

It’s all just reporters and editors and publishers scamming and lying… whether or not the exact quote came from an honest sourse or not, the process just fills space with empty words and any truth value is purey coincidental, but the process is used to tilt your perceptions.

Holiday is just another “look at me, I’m an attention whore”. His intent is more about pranks and less about the lack of vetting in the media. But then, that’s how a socialist empty suit got into the White House.